And why not? Dulcie had once played lost, starving kitty for over a week. Moved right in with a murder suspect and come away with information that nailed the killer.

But Joe shivered, remembering the look in Chichi Barbi's eyes, and he knew he couldn't have done that. That woman put a cat off, big time. Even Dulcie would hesitate to play easy with Chichi Barbi.

Yet no matter his fear, no matter how he distrusted her, Joe fully intended to find out what she had stashed in that black silk bag.

13

The big family kitchen of the Harper ranch smelled of freshly baked shortbread and fresh coffee, and of homemade custard for Wilma. She sat at the round kitchen table in her best tartan robe and new slippers, having come straight from the hospital where Lucinda and Pedric had picked her up. They had brought Dulcie to be with her, and brought Kit so she could continue telling Charlie her story. On the window seat Dulcie lay curled among the quilted pillows. But Kit sat straight and alert, her fluffy tail twitching. She was very much onstage and she had a most attentive audience as she told about her early life running with the wild band. At the table, Charlie was writing it all down.

Writing a book about me, Kit thought with excitement. And she's making the pictures, too. Pictures of me!\ Charlie had already collaborated-that was a new word for Kit-on a big, thick novel, so Kit guessed she knew how to write a book by herself, and she even had an agent who said it wasn't wise to make pictures for your own story except if you were a real artist, which Charlie was, so that was all right.

This story wouldn't have anything about how Kit could speak or was in any way different from other cats. Nothing about how the wild band was different, just a wonderful story about the adventures of a band of feral cats and an orphan kitten that they didn't want, that no one wanted but who tagged along with them because she had nowhere else to go.

"I was always hungry," Kit said, "and we were always moving on and on. I ate the scraps from the garbage cans, if they left any. They stole other cats' food from yards and porches but they never left any for me. The best place we ever came to was all among the green hills where there were rabbits under the bushes and in the little hollows and the big cats could catch them. I tried but I couldn't, they were too big and fast and the big cats didn't want to teach me to hunt, no one wanted to teach me like a mother cat would. My mother was dead. On the hills sometimes the coyotes came hunting us but there were oak trees to go up, and once I found a bird nest in the branches and I ate the baby birds but the big birds flapped their wings at me and swooped and pushed me out of the tree and I fell." The kit sighed. "I wanted to stay on the green hills but the others moved on, no one cared what I wanted, I was only a dumb kitten and I was scared to go off on my own."

Sometimes Kit felt shy telling her own story out loud, but she was excited, too. The same kind of excitement she'd felt when she'd sneaked onstage that time when Cora Lee was playing the lead in little theater and the whole audience watched her, Kit, the whole theater was still and she and Cora Lee did the whole scene together with Cora Lee singing, and they were stars that night, stars together for the whole play. Thorns of Gold ran for weeks and weeks and her picture was in the paper right there with Cora Lee, and Wilma and Clyde wanted to take her away and hide her and hide Joe and Dulcie too before anyone figured out that they were more than ordinary cats, but then Wilma thought of a way to make it all right, to make her, Kit, seem like just a trained cat that didn't talk but just had learned to do tricks.

Now telling her story she felt like she had felt on that stage in the bright lights; and her human friends listened and sipped their coffee and Dulcie purred. "When summer got real hot," Kit told them, "there was no more water in the hills and the grass turned all brown and more coyotes came real hungry all hunting us. We moved on then and I got so tired and so hot and hungry and thirsty. When I thought I couldn't go another step we came to a city with garbage in the alleys falling out of big metal cans and thrown away wrappers with bits of pizza and hot dogs still in them and the leaders ate and ate but they would never share. There were some empty houses with boarded-up basements, too, that we could get in when boys chased us or it rained, but once two boys shot at us with a gun and we ran and ran into a canyon and never went back there except to sneak food and run again. Arroyo Secco the canyon was called and it had bamboo jungles and broken concrete water pipes to hide in and we lived there a long time and came up among the houses at night to get food and to drink from the puddles where people watered their lawns. I was getting bigger and I learned to fight for something to eat but once I got bit and clawed real bad and that hurt for a long time so I could hardly walk."

Kit stopped for breath and for Charlie to catch up. Charlie was writing as fast as she could. When Kit looked out through the wide window, Ryan Flannery's big Weimaraner, Rock, looked in at her wagging his short tail. Beyond him across the grassy side yard, Ryan knelt on the roof of the stable tearing off the shingles, getting ready to raise up the roof the way she did on Clyde's house. Ryan would jack the roof's two sides right up to make new walls for a second floor. Kit thought that was amazing, what humans could do-what they would think of to do.

Ryan's uncle Scotty and her other carpenters would help her lift the two halves of the roof and nail them in place and then, like magic, they would put on a new roof, way high up, and there would be a whole new room up there, a big guest room right over the stable.

But right now there was just a lot of screeing and scritching as Ryan pulled out nails, and chunking sounds as she tossed the shingles down on the bed of her big red pickup.

Kit turned back when Charlie set two bowls of warm milk and a plate of shortbread down on the window seat for her and Dulcie. Everyone kept watching the side yard in case Ryan came down the ladder and headed for the house because Ryan didn't know that she and Dulcie could talk. They would be silent then like ordinary cats having a nap on the window seat. And they all watched the long drive, too, that came from the main road in case Captain Harper came home unexpectedly because he didn't know, either. How complicated life could be. Kit looked up at Charlie.

"What happened, Charlie, up on the hills? That you couldn't tell when we all had Mexican dinner?" Though she thought she already knew. She thought she knew very well what had made those scratches on the dead man's throat and sent him careening over the cliff to die crumpled under his heavy motorcycle.

Charlie looked at Kit a long time, and sipped her coffee. "I think your wild band has returned, Kit."

Kit shivered again and licked milk from her whiskers. When her wild clowder came there before to Hellhag Hill when she was little, that was when she saw Lucinda and Pedric there having a picnic and the Greenlaws knew right away that she was not an ordinary cat. They had shared their picnic with her and told her stories of her ancestors and she loved them right away, they belonged to one another right away and she left the wild band for this new life with the most wonderful people in the world. Now she looked at Lucinda and Pedric and purred and purred and they looked back at her all warm and happy. But even though she was safe with them, when she thought of the wild band so near, she trembled. Why would they come back? Why had they come here?